(Red Legacy, pt 1) Production Notes

It occurred to me that I am the proud possessor of the audio rights to a story that’s appeared in Asimov’s SF, and that I have a podcast, and the next step was obvious. :) I’ve already postedtwice about the story (although the second link contains spoilers for part two!! Be ye warned!), but there was one thing I learned that I forgot to include in the TIL post, so I’ll say it here instead:

I’ve lived my life in a world where childhood leukemia isn’t a death sentence. It still sucks hugely, please don’t think I’m saying it’s not a big deal, it’s awful. But all the common forms have very good survivability rates nowadays (nearly 90%!). So I thought I would have my work cut out for me to find a fast-acting and hard-to-cure terminal disease that strikes in childhood, when I started writing this. I was very wrong. As recently as a handful of decades ago (certainly in the time period Red Legacy is set in) leukemia killed the shit out of kids. :( It was almost invariably fatal, and could kill in a matter of months or even weeks. I didn’t realize what a scourge this was, and I’m glad we’ve become so good at fighting it now. Fuck cancer, and huzzah for science.